I bought a new computer… not.
During last year’s March, I left my computer for a while to take a break from work and I returned to my computer being restarted. The windows 10’s updates did the ridiculous restart and it had probably given me a few minutes to halt the action while I was away.
Anyway, what happened next was hell. My automation software started becoming lagging and I had to restart my computer in order to put it back to normal. It couldn’t last for a couple of hours before the software became unresponsive. My internet browsers gave way as well.
Instead of restarting my computer once in a few weeks or months, I had to restart it a few times per day. There were times when I didn’t go home, my automation software was as good as on strike. The only blessing was that Photoshop continued to run normally. I was able to play the online game Team Fortress 2 (TF2) and the issue didn’t seem to pose any problem to the game.
Another ridiculous thing was that my computer was a working beast with 32GB of RAM and running on Solid State Drive (SSD). The CPU and RAM usage had been staying comfortably way below 30%. My internet was running on fibre optical network. I ran speed test for the internet bandwidth when my software were unresponsive and it showed that my internet was actually stable.
I went online to search high and low for solutions. I configured the settings of my Windows 10 (including registries), downloaded special software to update all the drivers (some newer drivers weren’t detected by Windows 10), installed software to detect for errors in both my hardware and software, defragmented my disk drives, ran virus and malware scans, and even opened up my CPU to clear away the dust physically. Eventually, I reformatted my Windows 10. I also consulted some IT experts. Nothing worked.
Having to spend long hours in front of the computer everyday, it was hell for me, especially when I was someone who couldn’t stand inefficiency. For example, I would always try my best to use my computer to reply messages because it was much faster than typing on the tiny soft keyboard of my phone.
Although I kept telling myself to focus on my work, every few weeks or month, I would try to go online to search for solutions for hours. I was trained to find solution since young and I had the never-give-up attitude, or some people would say “stubborn”.
After my elder brother bought a new laptop, I installed my automation software on it and I was amazed that it was running smoothly on the Windows 10 operating system. So, I was able to confirm that it wasn’t the software’s fault (lazy programmers).
I tried “playing” around with some software as recommended in websites/forums, including Microsoft’s. Then, I even changed the LANs cable. I had probably exhausted all the testing and had little luck. The frustration thing was that every changes I made, I had to restart the computer and wait for a couple of hours in order to determine if it was the solution.
Out of desperation, I made a drastic move to uninstall my antivirus instead of temporary disabling it, which I had done before. An hour later, I was very hopeful that my software remained very responsive without gradually slowing down. It was near dawn and I left the computer alone without doing the usual rebooting before going to bed.
How I would describe my feeling was that I seemed to have recovered from nine months of constipation.